Beckett attempted to coordinate the efforts as best he could, until the djang began to wear off and the veneine lurched forth to drag him into the dark with its oppressive grip. He sat down on a toppled bronze statue of a man wrestling with some manner of lion and watched as the dull flames were finally extinguished, the rocks were cleared away, and charred bodies were pulled from the wreckage. His eyelids were heavy; the sleepless night was catching up with him.
Mr. Stitch arrived some time after that, and Beckett did not notice the hulking reanimate, as it, too, watched the rescue efforts and took stock. Stitch stood very still, taking in every piece of information available, processing it all with its astonishing mechanical brain, breathing its deep, raspy breaths from its artificial lungs.
“What. Happened?” Stitch asked, finally? Not because it hadn’t surmised, obviously, but because Beckett’s opinion was one more datum to be collected, processed, and stored.
“Incendiary bomb,” Beckett replied. “All our security was meant to find oneiric munitions. Should have realized. Firebomb’s just as dangerous, probably easier to get a hold of.”
“Hindsight,” said Mr. Stitch, as it considered the fallen buildings. The upper storeys of Raithower house had collapsed forward into the courtyard, filling the space with jagged spears of stone and splintered wood. Beside it, a crevasse had opened up, cracking the roof of the labyrinth of understreets and vaults that made up Old Bank. This area of the Arcadium had been small flats in use by largely bachelors and students; with luck, most of them had been empty. An outer wall had fallen away from the underground buildings, leaving a honeycomb of disintegrating rooms visible from the surface. Light from the parts of the building that were still burning spattered the scene with a dusky red glow, while the rain washed dirty rivulets of mud and ash across every conceivable surface. “Inside?”
“Don’t know. I’d only just got here when the…when it happened. Don’t know who was there. Third watch, I expect. That’s…uhm.” Beckett put his head in his hands. “Heathcliff. Courton. Shit. The knocker from the low countries. What…” he took a deep breath. “Can’t remember his name.”
“Happes.” Stitch turned away from the rescue operation, and considered Beckett in its dead, passionless manner. A nearby phlogiston streetlight had lost its glass panes in the explosion, and now fountained eldritch blue light into the sky. Muddled with the red light from the fire, the lamp made everything the livid purple color of a new bruise. “Plans?”
“Plans, yeah, plans. I don’t…” This was supposed to be it, Beckett knew. The final proof. Anonymous John was everywhere, he could get to anyone, he could do anything. There was nowhere safe. John had struck right to the heart of the Coroners, and Beckett was supposed to acknowledge a superior force and surrender to it. If this had been Anonymous John’s intention, Beckett resolved at that moment to demonstrate that it represented a serious miscalculation. “All right. He wants a war, we’ll give it to him. I’m going to shut him down.”
“How?”
“I need. Everything. The War Ministry still has impressment powers, right? And the new Moral Standards Committee, their files. I want to commandeer everything, every man, every piece of information in the city, shut down every port, search every ship and warehouse.” Anonymous John’s operations had been notoriously difficult to dismantle because they were robustly decentralized-small cells operating under instructions, and barely aware of each other. And the process had been repeatedly hampered by the fact that law enforcement in the city was itself decentralized, and subject to the whims of its neighborhood commanders, to the needs of conflicting bureaucracies, the flailing inconsistency of public opinion. But John’s organization was still, ultimately, parasitic-it required the ordinary functioning of the city to survive, and had been permitted to exist for so long because it was more trouble to destroy it than it was really worth. “I don’t even care if we never find him. I’ll keep all fucking industry in this town tied up until he starves to death. I will dismantle every tiny piece of his operation if it takes me a hundred years.”
“Ambitious.” Stitch replied. As usual, no emotions betrayed its opinion on the subject. Whatever Mr. Stitch believed, it was keeping it to itself.
“This isn’t just heresy anymore, or civil unrest. He’s not just bombing some local gendarmerie. The Coroners is a division of the Imperial Guard. Attacking us is treason. He has directly compromised the safety of the Emperor himself, and I want unlimited powers to track him down. Fucking unlimited.”
Stitch was silent, just stared at him with those unblinking, brass eyes, then turned away. Its dead, ichor-pickled muscles creaked audibly as it did so. It was not officially reported, but still fairly commonly-known, that Mr. Stitch was routinely consulted by the Emperor’s personal medical staff on a variety of scientific subjects. Ostensibly, as the head of the Coroner’s division, there were specific, proscribed-and often intricate and confusing-channels through which Mr. Stitch had to act in order to so much as change the color of the front door of the office. But the fact was that Mr. Stitch had the ear of the Emperor if he it was required, and what Beckett said was true. The Imperial Guard, for the safety of the Emperor and the Empire, necessarily had to be sacrosanct. There should be no citizen that felt anything but terror at the thought of raising their hand against the Emperor’s appointed servants of law and order. John’s attacks had set a dangerous precedent.
It is possible that these were the thoughts that Mr. Stitch’s incalculably complex difference-engine of a brain was considering in that moment, that and a nest of future possibilities, weighed against past experience, evaluated according to their upcoming likelihoods, a treacherous reef of non-optimal outcomes through which the reanimate needed to sail. Future outcomes were difficult to predict, as even the most fervent daemonomaniacs who pretended to absolute causal knowledge of the universe were forced to admit. And, moreover, Mr. Stitch had to accommodate this new information into whatever vast plans for the city it had itself been making for the last two hundred years. It was a daunting task, but if there was any mind capable of it, it was Stitch’s.
While Mr. Stitch computed, Beckett became conscious of another voice shouting his name. A familiar voice. “Skinner?” He asked. He looked up. The young woman was wrapped in a dressing gown and a heavy coat, hair loose and plastered across her face by the rain, silver-eyeplate glinting red and blue, as though she’d proceeded directly from bed to the patchwork light that now illuminated what remained of Raithower House. Karine was behind her, somewhat less appropriately-attired, as the indige had different customs regarding what constituted acceptable sleepwear than her Trowthi brethren. They were both panic-stricken; Karine led Skinner by one hand, Skinner clutched at her cane with the other.
“Beckett! Where is he? Is he all right? I don’t hear him…” Skinner was saying.
“Who? Is who all right?” Beckett was on his feet at once; too quickly; his head spun.
“Valentine!”
Beckett shook his head. “Valentine’s not here, his shift doesn’t start for another hour-”